


Living by the Clock

by AstroGirl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Introspection, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-01
Updated: 2009-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-04 02:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short post-"Girl in the Fireplace" piece from Reinette's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living by the Clock

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Two of Us Beatles lyrics fic challenge. The assigned lyrics are quoted at the beginning and are from "Don't Pass Me By," from the White Album. Given what I ended up with, this was really the only story I possibly could write! Many thanks to Lizamanynames for a highly reassuring beta.

_I hear the clock a-ticking on the mantelshelf,  
See the hands a-moving but I'm by myself,  
I wonder where you are tonight and why I'm by myself_   


 

She has not repaired the clock. She does not want to think about the passing of time. Yet she can hear it ticking still, echoing through the open doors of her mind. And when she closes her eyes, she can see the hands moving, inexorably marking out the hours of his absence.

She knows that keeping it is foolish. It has no power that will bring him back. She saw wonders and miracles in the Doctor's mind, but not magic. Not that kind. Still, she cannot bring herself to part with it just yet. Perhaps a little later. Or perhaps when he comes they will laugh at it, pointless, broken symbol that it is, and she will at last be free from its hold on her mind.

In the meantime... she lives. The days are far from empty. There is the King, of course, and her family. Art and music and books, and the endless business and pleasures of the Court. She will not pine her days away in waiting, in this she is resolute. She would not honor him so little as to waste the life he has saved for her. And yet beneath the endless activity, beneath the small joys and sorrows of ordinary life, there runs a constant thread of hopeful longing, a sense of incompleteness, of the loss of things she's never known.

Every night she looks out her window at the stars. She has learned all their names, and she recites them softly to herself and wonders if he is looking back from this one or that one, or if he is wandering lost, somewhere in the void between. She will not for a moment allow herself to believe that he has forgotten her, or that he was only the product of her imagination, after all.

She longs to visit those stars, to see for herself the wonders she glimpsed so briefly in the Doctor's mind. Who would not? It is a marvelous and tantalizing thought, that there is infinitely more to the world than the human race has ever known. But more than that, she longs to touch him again. She does not flatter herself so much as to think that she alone can ease the centuries' weight of loneliness that lies in his heart, but it would be enough, for a moment or two, to remind him again how to dance.

It is not an entirely selfless desire. All her life, she has surrounded herself with extraordinary men. Writers, sculptors, artists, the King himself. And the Doctor is the most extraordinary man she has ever known. She would give a great deal to speak with him once more, a great deal more to walk again though the open doors of his mind into that place inside, richer and more beautiful even than Versailles, so sad and welcoming and strange. Such a deeply intimate thing, to know and be known from the inside, in ways as far from normal human understanding as the stars are from the Earth.

"You've never been alone in your life," he'd said to her, as that life lay all open before him. And he had been entirely correct. But now she thinks that at last she understands what it is to feel alone.

And so she waits, and she hopes. And, inside her mind, the clock continues to tick.


End file.
